A Song in the Night

by Bob Massie

  We eventually moved to one of the oldest sections of Paris, the Marais, and lived in a four-hundred-year-old apartment building. We had a small garden in the back, and just over the garden wall were the barracks of the Garde Republicaine, a cavalry unit of the French army much like the British Royal Horse Guards. The president of France often used this regiment, in full dress uniform, swords drawn, to welcome foreign heads of state or to escort him in parades. Every morning as we drank our coffee and prepared to go to school, we could hear the clip-clop of their chestnut horses as the guards practiced their maneuvers, often combined with the brilliant harmonies of their trumpets.

  Coming from America, we were captivated by everything that was different. Many of the city’s streets revealed the capital city’s preoccupation with two of its major pursuits: fashion and food. I was mesmerized by the endless number of places to eat. Every street was lined with bistros and cafés, with patisseries (selling pastries and ice cream), boulangeries (selling all the popular forms of bread and many other prepared foods), and fromageries (cheese stores). Specialty stores for fish, meat, fruit, vegetables, and wine squeezed into tiny spaces next to each other from one side of the city to the other. At that time there were few supermarkets and the refrigerators in most apartments were tiny, so most people bought something fresh for their meals every day. When they didn’t want to eat at home, people sat at tiny outdoor tables on the sidewalks of the boulevards and ordered food and drink from well before breakfast until long after midnight.

  After we spent a year in a supposedly bilingual school, where, unfortunately, we learned very little French, my parents transferred us to a new school, the Collège Sévigné, on the Left Bank. The experience plunged me into yet another setting in which I was made aware of my differences from the community around me. I was an American in a school full of French children, and a boy in a sea of girls.

  Established in 1880 as the first nondenominational school for young women in France, the Collège Sévigné had endured for nearly ninety years as a single-sex facility until the turbulent events of 1968, when an explosion in French society pitted leftist university students against a conservative government and a tough police force. The crisis led to months of anarchy in the schools and factories, and thousands of other institutions simply stopped functioning. Seeking relief from the chaos, parents clamored for the schools where they had enrolled their daughters to admit their sons as well. I entered in the first coeducational class. In my eighth-grade class there was only me and a French boy named Jean-Yves Grindel with twenty-six girls.

  It was not easy to win acceptance in such a setting, particularly since we were all skidding into puberty. Teenage Parisian girls, like their counterparts around the world, showed little interest in boys their own age. The thrill in their lives came from high school boys, even college students, who arrived at the end of the school day on their buzzing mopeds, their long dark hair and scarves trailing in the wind, cigarettes hanging lazily from their mouths. My female classmates would hop on the back of these machines, wrap their arms around the waist of the boy in front of them, and go speeding off with the sound of squealing tires and laughter. Sometimes I would spot them in nearby cafés, smoking and drinking red wine with their wire-thin admirers, while I sighed, reshouldered my book bag, and trudged home.

  Though I was barred from these emerging romantic encounters, some girls still reached across the cultural divide to include me. They found my strange accent, my clumsy verbal mistakes, and even my unusual medical problems interesting. Their affection was similar to what one would show to a pet. It didn’t help that in France my name, Bobby, was the stereotypical name for a cute little dog. At the same time, there was an element of mercy in their efforts of inclusion. Some girls, recognizing that I had absorbed almost nothing of what was said in class for the first few weeks, cornered me in the corridors, at lunch, or in study hall to offer emergency tutorials before the next class.

  At the time, the French national system of education, designed by Napoleon to create a uniform national standard of excellence, thrived on ranking, ordering, grading, and excluding. There was no sense that a child—especially a middle-school child—should be offered flexibility and room to grow. The goal of the system was to sort children quickly into the areas in which they would best serve the state. By the time most children were fifteen, they had been classified into iron categories that determined what they would be allowed to study, what universities they would be permitted to attend, and thus what careers they would be able to pursue—elite careers in science or government for those with the best scores, teaching careers in the humanities for the next ranks, and trades for everyone else. Once these decisions had been made, there was virtually no chance to alter the outcome.

  To speed the process of sorting, schools measured, graded, recorded, and finally published results for every student by class, subject, and age group. Class rankings were announced publicly after every test, and in every subject every six weeks. Grades were based on a scale of 1 to 20. Class participation and deportment counted for a great deal. Teachers enforced discipline by handing out extra zeros, which arbitrarily lowered one’s score and rank for the month.

  The system reeked of bias and whim. “Do you want to know what kind of grades you can expect from me?” one teacher asked us early in the year. “Here is my scale. Twenty is reserved for Almighty God. Nineteen is for the original author of the passage, such as Racine or Corneille. Eighteen is for the greatest scholar in the world. Seventeen would be for me. Your scores will all fall underneath—in most cases very far underneath.” Under these circumstances a student was considered a genius of the first order if she or he received a 15. Most students felt thrilled to pocket a 12.

  Like every Western society in the late 1960s, France seethed with turmoil. There were so many strikes and demonstrations by workers and students that the French government deployed a specially trained and brutal group of riot police, known as the Companies Républicaines de Sécurité, or CRS, virtually every week. The CRS wore black helmets, tall boots, and dark blue uniforms specifically designed for street battle; they carried truncheons and plastic shields. I routinely discovered on my way to school that CRS trucks had cordoned off some section of Paris. One morning my municipal bus became stuck in the middle of a fierce demonstration; I watched as demonstrators and CRS officers flailed away at each other on the street corners. At one point two CRS officers grabbed a young female demonstrator. One of the men held her arms behind her back while the other deliberately stomped sideways on her ankle, breaking it. They then dropped her on the ground and fled.

  There were also many good sides of French society. Like all the other countries in Europe, France had emerged from World War II with a deep commitment to provide health care to every citizen in the country. Unlike the United States, with its haphazard and unjust system of free-market insurance, France believed that everyone deserved health care as a right and created an interlocking system of national and private delivery and payment systems. To our surprise, my parents discovered that we were eligible for French health insurance, even though we were only residents, not citizens. Apparently the government considered it unthinkable that a child with a severe illness such as mine would not be treated on French soil simply because he or she had the wrong passport. In part because of this government policy, which gave me unlimited access to key blood products whenever I needed them, I experienced greater and greater freedom from bleeding at the same time that I was going through puberty and seeking more independence. Though I still had terrible problems from time to time, I was eventually able to stabilize my condition enough to travel on the subway at will and explore distant parts of the city for many hours on end.

  I also wanted to bring greater freedom to my classmates at school. I felt that the students lacked a voice and a venue in which to discuss the changes they wanted to see. The solution, I decided, was obvious: a school newspaper! When I proposed the concept to my friends, they all thought
it excellent—and completely hopeless. Students expressing their own ideas? Impossible.

  I made an appointment with the formidable head of the school, known as Mme. la Directrice, and appeared at the appointed hour wearing a tie and carrying a pile of carefully prepared notes. She was a tiny woman who dressed entirely in black and whose silver hair was pulled back in a bun that suggested a helmet. She listened to me with a furrowed brow; I could not tell whether I was making progress or digging myself into deep trouble. Finally, at the end, she paused for a long time and then said she would consider it. The next day she called me back in, and to my surprise, she said that she would approve it as long as she could review the document before it was printed.

  The whole project quickly became an example of the adage “Be careful what you wish for.” A handful of overworked students had to solicit, write, edit, illustrate, type, and mimeograph the articles. After six weeks of intense labor, my classmates and I brought out the first—and, it turned out, the only—newspaper in the ninety-year history of the school.

  We also took on the rampant problem of cheating. Because of the emphasis on memorization and grades, students tried every trick they could think of to give themselves an advantage. They wrote notes on their hands or on tiny pieces of paper that they concealed in their jewelry. They sat next to each other and copied each other’s exam papers. In many cases the teachers simply turned a blind eye; students often brought their textbooks into the testing room and secretly balanced them on their knees just below the level of the tabletop, so they could copy directly from them.

  When I brought it up, everyone agreed that this was a serious problem. I quickly realized that their concern was not enough. The students did not want to stop doing it, and the teachers did not want to admit that it was taking place, and so nothing happened. My efforts at organizing foundered. From this I learned a lesson about the special challenge of trying to create change when there is no constituency to support it.

  The longer I was in France, the more I came to admire the United States. Part of it was the longing that comes over every expatriate to return to his or her country. At one point I experienced such longing for America that it influenced a major purchase. I had accumulated a small amount of money from odd jobs and allowance, and I was thinking about purchasing a guitar or a tape recorder. I went to a French music store and noticed a long row of banjos lining the top of the wall.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “That one is a six-string banjo, tuned like a guitar,” said the young man. “And that one is a four-string jazz banjo.”

  “And what’s that one?” I asked, pointing to the last one in the row.

  “That’s the five-string American banjo,” he said.

  I bought it on the spot.

  “How can I learn to play it?” I asked, a little late.

  He shrugged his shoulders. Then his eyes lit up and he dashed into a room behind the counter. I heard him tossing papers and books around. A few minutes later he emerged with a mimeographed copy in English of How to Play the 5-String Banjo, by Pete Seeger. I went home happy and locked myself in my room for the better part of a week. I have been playing ever since.

  Thus, looking at American culture from a distance, I came to see its good qualities. Though my family and I opposed the Vietnam War, I grew tired of listening to constant criticism of American policy. I became particularly incensed when people thought that the United States was the only country in the world that had a problem with racism. Once, over lunch, an aging woman whose only job was to sit at the top of the stairs and shout at children to slow down came over to speak to me. She launched into a lengthy attack on America’s appalling treatment of its minority citizens. I listened for a while.

  “But don’t you believe, Madame, that France has its own problems with race?” I said. “I see Africans sweeping the streets and Algerians working construction, but in no other jobs. Perhaps the French people have their own difficulties with race?”

  “Oh no, pas du tout!” she exclaimed. “We are not racists in any way! We even let them be policemen!”

  Living abroad also brought us into contact with an endless string of fascinating people from all over the world who filed through our home and told their stories. One of the universal themes was the escape from tyranny. Sitting in Europe, barely two decades away from World War II and only a few hundred miles from the military power of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, we became keenly aware of the human dimension of the struggle for human rights.

  Our family was deeply involved in Russian history and contemporary Russian life. My father set to work on what turned into a ten-year project of writing a biography of Peter the Great. My mother wrote a series of essays and translations of Russian poetry, printed in both Russian and English. It was published in 1972 as The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets from Leningrad. During her many trips to Russia my mother had also fallen in with a circle of painters, dancers, and other artists. She began to collect their stories and, in modest amounts, their works, smuggling them out among her clothes.

  We heard at first hand about Soviet brutality against those the state considered intellectually or politically dangerous. When the Soviet secret police suspected that one of our friends and one of Russia’s great character dancers, Sasha Mintz, wanted to leave Russia, they sent thugs who beat him and broke his collarbone. We were horrified, for we knew that such an attack could easily have ended his career. My parents also fought for years on behalf of the ballet couple Valery and Galina Panov. Though Valery was one of the greatest dancers in all Russia, he was largely unknown in the West, because he had been allowed to perform only a single time in New York. When he applied to emigrate to Israel, he was fired and exiled to a distant rural town; his wife, Galina, also a dancer, was pressured to divorce him; and he lived with the daily fear of violence and assassination. After many years he was released, but only after my parents and hundreds of other supporters in the West held protests and pressured the Soviet Union to stop its destruction of this exceptional artist.

  That single success did little to alter our disgust with Soviet human rights violations and hypocrisy. I learned through these experiences that the crime of brutalizing citizens required no particular political label. It did not matter whether the government was identified as left-wing or right-wing; dictators were dictators. They needed to be opposed no matter what the political excuses for their behavior. Stories of persecution and brutality arrived almost daily in the mail or over the ancient black telephone that sat on the oval table near the window overlooking the courtyard with its peaceful trees.

  One day when I was fifteen, our friend Phyllis Glaeser asked if we would like to come that evening to see the rough cut of a documentary by a friend of hers. In the small screening room we met a quiet and intense black director named Nelson (“Nana”) Mahomo. The film, called Last Grave at Dimbaza, depicted the brutal system of racial segregation that governed a country I had never heard of—South Africa. The focus of the film was the policy of resettlement, under which black citizens, particularly women and children, who had moved to towns and squatter camps near South Africa’s major cities were forcibly relocated to distant spots in their “homelands”—in fact, little more than bleak, waterless dumping grounds. The South African minister of justice argued that the breakup of families was justified because “black workers must not be burdened with superfluous appendages like women and children.” The resulting misery, poverty, malnutrition, and disease decimated the population, so much so that in some parts of the country only half the babies lived past the age of five.

  Apartheid was a system specially designed for the twentieth century and aggressively defended as a positive good. It was administered by an intelligent, mechanized modern government controlled by an all-white political group known as the National Party. In addition, this government frequently proclaimed itself a democratic ally of the United States, something that American presidents seemed to tolerate. And judging from t
he numerous shots of American corporate facilities that popped up throughout the film, the United States apparently had extensive and unapologetic commercial arrangements with the white rulers of this regional power on the tip of the great continent.

  The message of the film struck me powerfully. What impressed me even more, however, was Nana Mahomo’s attitude. While we fidgeted in our seats, flinching at the grotesque truths that the film implacably laid before us, Nana sat quietly. When the movie was over and the small audience asked him questions, he answered with an intensity both quiet and strangely majestic.

  Though he was reluctant to talk about his own experience, we gradually pieced together his story. He was a member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a vigorous rival to the African National Congress. On March 21, 1960, seeking to spark a national uprising against white rule—and to gain the upper hand over the ANC—the PAC called for a general strike. Robert Sobukwe, the head of the PAC, personally asked Mahomo to leave the country the day before in order to serve as an ambassador extraordinaire, ready to explain the new regime to foreign governments and to negotiate relationships for the new government among the family of nations. Instead, the uprising failed. Not enough people learned of it in time. Those who did congregate met a murderous South African police and military.

  In the town of Sharpeville, white forces fired rifles, pistols, and machine guns directly into a packed crowd of protesters. Sixty-nine fell dead, including more than a dozen women and children—many shot in the back—in what became known as the “Sharpeville massacre.” Robert Sobukwe, in an act of brash courage, turned himself in to the police for violating the official “pass laws”; they happily arrested him and jailed him for the rest of his life. His colleagues were hunted down, imprisoned, or shot. Mahomo, watching these events from abroad, realized that he was now completely cut off from everything and everyone to which he had devoted his life.